1. Field of Invention
This invention relates generally to a facing attachable to wall boards forming walls and ceilings of the rooms in office and residential buildings, and more particularly to a facing which acts to reinforce the wall board to which it is attached and to enhance its thermal barrier, acoustic and decorative characteristics.
2. Status of Prior Art
In the construction of office and residential buildings, it is now common practice to form walls and ceiling of their rooms by using wall boards for this purpose. These provide a so-called hollow wall structure in which there exists a free space or hollow behind the wall boards. Wall boards are made of various materials including plywood and asbestos cement sheet. The most widely used material is known as sheet rock, for this relatively inexpensive board is composed of a layer of gypsum sandwiched between two sheets of heavy paper.
Sheet rock, though relatively weak, has many practical advantages, for it is easy to install and its exposed paper surface may be painted or have wallpaper adhered thereto. And sheet rock is easily repaired, for if holes are bored therein to receive anchors for mounting fixtures or other objects on the wall board, when the anchors are later removed, the exposed holes may be filled with spackle.
However, sheet rock also has serious drawbacks, for this material is easily gouged in that its paper and gypsum constituents offer little resistance to scoring. And sheet rock has only fair thermal barrier properties, and in a heated room whose wall and ceiling surfaces are defined by sheet rock, there is a gradual loss of heat by reason of heat transfer through the sheet rock. Sheet rock tends to reflect sound, for its gypsum core is not sound absorbent; hence it is often necessary when a ceiling is formed of sheet rock to attach sound absorbing acoustic tiles thereto.
Since a facing for a wall board is formed from a paper-plastic film laminate, of prior art background interest are the patents to Peer U.S. Pat. No. 4,254,173 and Jensen, U.S. Pat. No. 4,549,917 which disclose such laminates, but lack the properties of a facing in accordance with the invention.
The advantage gained by covering a sheet rock wall with wallpaper is that the paper serves to adorn the wall, for wallpaper usually has printed thereon a multi-colored decorative pattern or attractive graphics. And since wallpaper is applied to a wall by first coating the inner surface thereof with a water-soluble adhesive, when the wallpaper becomes soiled or when one wishes to replace it with a wallpaper having a pattern, it is a relatively simple matter to remoisten and soften the adhesive underlying the wallpaper in order to strip it from the wall.
However, a conventional wallpaper is lacking in strength and does not act to significantly reinforce a sheet rock wall or to act as a moisture, acoustic or thermal barrier and thereby enhance the properties of the wall.